MARCH 27, 2014 4:00 AM
Monocle, the bible of cosmopolitan elites, turns seven.
By Kevin D. Williamson
"But The Economist, a venerable publication founded in 1843 for the purpose of advocating repeal of the Corn Laws, has some competition, in the form of its considerably hipper seven-year-old cousin,Monocle, founded and edited by the Canadian journalist and entrepreneur Tyler Brûlé. It is a magazine that is in general focused on a particular brand of well-heeled global urbanism, the go-to source for articles on the soft power of native Finnish people (“On top of the world: Why the Sámi people are in pole position”), how not to be a bad tourist (“Indonesia’s significant attractions seem to have been overlooked by tourists who flock to Southeast Asia. And that’s a great shame, says Monocle’s Aisha Speirs”), such new-urbanist obsessions as bicycling (“Kenji Hall goes for a little bike ride — in the middle of traffic-clogged Jakarta with the city’s governor, a Spanish MotoGP world champion and the ambassador of Denmark”), second-tier global cities (“Evolution theory: There’s more to Darwin than cyclones and crocodiles”), etc. It can be a little precious at times — Monocle doesn’t have bureaus, it has bureaux — but Mr. Brûlé and his colleagues have something that is notably lacking in many publishing concerns, that being a sense of how to make money and what to do with it, and an admirable entrepreneurial spirit. Rather than simply selling advertisements for high-end goods, it sells goods itself, funding the opening of its Hong Kong bureau from sales at its London retail shops. It operates a radio station and cafés, and partners with like-minded designers to market goods directly to its readers. It commissions short films and shows them on its website. The result of this large-minded entrepreneurship was a 2013 operating profit of 48 percent and $3 million worth of traditional advertising in its December-January 2013 issue."
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